Clients sometimes ask whether they can skip discovery and start building. We understand the impulse, but two weeks spent understanding the problem is the cheapest insurance a project can buy.
In discovery we interview the people who will use the software, map the systems it has to talk to and run technical spikes on the riskiest assumptions. Designers prototype the key journeys while engineers sketch the architecture.
The result is a prioritised roadmap, a costed plan and a shared understanding of what success looks like. More than once, discovery has shown that the most valuable first release was half the size everyone expected.
